American Experience presents a virtual PAST FORWARD conversation exploring how the choice of a vice presidential candidate can shape a presidential campaign and a presidency itself. The discussion is inspired in part by the new film THE AMERICAN VICE PRESIDENT, streaming now on the American Experience YouTube channel and on the PBS app.
In this conversation, panelists will discuss how and why a campaign picks a certain candidate for the bottom slot on a presidential ticket. They will examine how the media and the general public can interpret these selections differently, asking whether a VP pick can be a decisive factor in an election. Finally, the panelists will take a closer look at how the campaign role of a vice presidential candidate can reveal their role in a potential administration.
Panelists:
Michael Kazin is the author of seven books about US politics and social movements and the editor of The Princeton Encyclopedia of American Political History. He writes often for The New York Times, The Nation, The New Republic, and other periodicals and newspapers and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His most recent book is What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party.
Christopher Devine is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Dayton. Devine is a leading expert on vice presidential candidates. He is the co-author, with Kyle C. Kopko, of two books on this topic, including Do Running Mates Matter? The Influence of Vice Presidential Candidates in Presidential Elections (University Press of Kansas, 2020) and The VP Advantage: How Running Mates Influence Home State Voting in Presidential Elections (Manchester University Press, 2016). Their research has been featured in numerous media outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, NPR, CNN, Fox News, Vox, and FiveThirtyEight.
The discussion will be moderated by Adriane Lentz-Smith. Adriane is an Associate Professor of History at Duke University, where she teaches courses on the Civil Rights Movement, Black Lives, Modern America, and History in Fact and Fiction. A scholar of African American history as well as the histories of the twentieth-century United States and the US & the World, Lentz Smith is the author of Freedom Struggles: African Americans and World War I (Harvard University Press, 2009), as well as numerous other scholarly articles and reviews.
Official Website: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/citizen-hearst/
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/movement-and-madman/
This program is made possible by viewers like you.
Support your local PBS station: https://www.pbs.org/donate
Subscribe to the AMERICAN EXPERIENCE channel for more videos: https://www.youtube.com/@AmericanExperiencePBS
Enjoy full episodes of your favorite AMERICAN EXPERIENCE shows anytime, anywhere with the free PBS App: https://to.pbs.org/2QbtzhR
FOLLOW AMERICAN EXPERIENCE
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AmericanExperiencePBS/
Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/AmExperiencePBS/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/AmericanExperiencePBS/
Threads: https://www.threads.net/@americanexperiencepbs
Shop: https://shop.pbs.org/
